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This paper used a new source of information (ESRU-EMOVI NL) to estimate, for the first time, the lower limit of unequal opportunities in a federal state in Mexico. Using the former criterion concerning unequal opportunities, a lower threshold indicated 35% inequality in economic resources in the state. As at the national level, the main contributors to unequal opportunities in the state are unequal economic resources by origin and parental education. However, in contrast to what has been observed, for the country as a whole, inequalities associated with people's skin tone account for 5% of observed unequal opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows the results of a qualitative/documentary study on intercultural education carried out in the mountain region of Guerrero, Mexico. The paper analyzes in particular the Universidad Intercultural de los Pueblos del Sur, which has been able to develop a project in intercultural education and even expand it to five municipalities in the state of Guerrero. The university represents a space of informal education for indigenous youth, using an educational model oriented to the rural perspective and encouraging abilities in communities and families through technical assistance by transferring technology and specialized knowledge in agricultural activities. The paper concludes by making recommendations that orient intercultural educational practice, taking into account the evidence contributed by research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work offers an analysis of the development of the concept of educational justice in Mexico from the mid 1970s to the first decade of the 21st century. Based on a perspective underpinned by conceptual history and hypotheses on the externalization of the compared education approach, this paper highlights a reemergence and sedimentation of the concept of educational justice during the 1990s, both in academia and official discourse. This is explained in part by growing social and educational inequalities and the externalization of national discourse, which have fostered an original hybridization that points towards a renewal of optimism in schools, and the possibility of more just - or simply less unjust - societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Mexico had a significant increase in years of schooling in the last 20 years, the quality of its education system -an important determinant of long term growth- is far from being satisfactory. Using the results from the first standardized test in upper middle school (ENLACE MS), the paper shows that a model including household, personal, institutional, and school characteristics can account for more than 40 percent of the total differences observed in math scores. From a policy perspective, the paper's results suggest that education authorities interested in fostering education quality should concentrate in improving school infrastructure, the quality of its teachers and the relationship between students and school authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compulsory high school education is a process that has been developing, with different characteristics, in some Latin American countries. In Mexico, the H. Congress of the Union modified the 3rd and 31st articles of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States to extend compulsory education to high school from 2012. Although there is a growth of enrollment in this level of education, many young people do not attend high school or they interrupt their studies. With the purpose of describing some characteristics of this process in Mexico, I present reflections that emerged from a recently concluded research in dialogue with the current bibliography. It is a study that analyzes, from an ethnographic perspective, the accreditation of subjects in everyday life at Colegio de Bachilleres high school in Mexico City. We claim that the credit system is affected by a mandate that is present in current educational policies: to improve young people's indexes of access to school, enrollment, and passing courses in high school. The aim of this paper is to identify challenges for the institutions that are envisioned in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative analysis in relation to the emergency of the studies on educational inequalities in Mexico and Argentina, between the fifties and sixtys of the twentieth century. Theoretics, methodologic and comparative perspective is used, for draw up to similarities and differences between both countries. Two points are relevant: convergence is highlighted in the rationales underlying the emerging research on educational inequalities in both countries, as well as the relevance of certain discursive transfers between international and na tional productions, both facts makes each case singu lar and sig nificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercultural higher education in Mexico works toward the creation of new professional, cultural, and linguistically pertinent profiles that empower indigenous youth and their communities. This paper presents the empirical results of a research project that ethnographically accompanies young graduates from an intercultural Mexican university, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural. The objective is to describe the way this institution develops knowledge/activities by opening up to other types of knowledge; an analysis is made of the characteristics of the university's recent graduates, and their academic and community knowledge is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the epistemological diversity and indigenous praxis present in intercultural education, through the case of Instituto Superior Intercultural Ayuuk (isia) in Jaltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The main objectives are to outline the range of conceptions of intercultural education, describe its key articulations, and explore the way that knowledge is conceived, constructed, and transmitted in this institute. Two arguments are stated: a) The lack of a predetermined meaning in intercultural higher education allows people from diverse backgrounds to become interested in and form part of this project, enabling new epistemological diversity; b) Although isia uses the praxis and social organization of the Ayuuk people, a more profound dialogue is still lacking among diverse types of knowledge and epistemological frameworks. Therefore, isia represents an important case for exploring the negotiation among diverse perspectives to construct a unique vision of intercultural higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study carried out in the rural communities of San José Navajas, Jesús María, and Chichimequillas in the municipality of El Marqués, in the state of Querétaro, Mexico. Taking into account the theory of mental spaces, the objective was to discover and explain the community members' perception of their filling the jobs created by the opening of the international airport and two industrial parks in the region. Twenty-three semi-structured interviews were conducted with qualified respondents in the communities. The results show that independent from their precarious economic situation, the inhabitants recognize the importance of the relation between education and work in obtaining better jobs. The observation is made that the respondents' social image and individual perceptions recognize that education is a factor in personal development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses processes of sociocultural appropriation in the federal school project, as verified in rural locations in the eastern part of the Valley of Mexico, during the expansion of the Secretariat of Public Education between 1922 and 1940. Documentation includes incidents of cultural conflict involving neighbors and users of schools featuring the so-called pedagogy of action used in federal schools. The analysis is centered fundamentally on the conflict surrounding practices of teaching for life, coeducation, and the growth and encouragement of the new measures that schools inspired by such pedagogy were expected to understand. The analysis of incidents reveals not only the forms of resistance generated by rural nonconformity but also the negotiating processes that molded the local cultural appropriation of the school project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a transversal study with a predominantly qualitative methodological profile that describes the evolution of academic self-concepts during adolescence. The sample consisted of 150 young people from various schools in the state of Sinaloa: fifty students per age group (twelve, fifteen, and eighteen years old), divided equally between males and females. Three instruments were used: a) a Piagetian critical clinical interview, b) self-concept questionnaire form 5, and c) profile of self-perceptions. The results show that change undergone in the academic self-concept has a flexible nature during adolescence and decreases at age fifteen; as in other studies, no differences by gender were seen. In spite of their provisional nature, the results may serve in the design of strategies that contribute to configuring adolescents' self-concept, that improve their performance as students, and that stimulate their personal development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay by Backhoff and Contreras published in issue 63 of Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa offers solid evidence of bias in the results of the enlace test. The authors conclude that the "inflation" of scores can be explained by "testing conditions and the consequences associated with scores". Both elements, which are not developed in the authors' work, are a reminder of the context of implementing teacher evaluations in recent years, by means of a system of political interactions between educational authorities and the teachers' union. This paper attempts to offer some explanatory elements of the relation between the Secretariat of Public Education and the National Union of Workers in Education, with regard to this subject. The guiding idea--which various authors have developed in depth--stipulates that for several decades, the form and content of basic educational policies in Mexico have arisen from such relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the gestation process, implementation methodology, and results obtained from the initiative to use e-learning to train human resources for health, six years after the launch of the Virtual Campus of Public Health of the University of Guadalajara (Mexico); the discussion is framed by Pan American Health Organization(PAHO) standards and practices. This is a special report on the work done by the institutional committee of the Virtual Campus in western Mexico to create an Internet portal that follows the guidelines of the strategic model established by No do Méxicoand PAHO for the Region of the Americas. This Virtual Campus began its activities in 2007, on the basis of the use of free software and institutional collaboration. Since the initial year of implementation of the node, over 500 health professionals have been trained using virtual courses, the node's educational platform, and a repository of virtual learning resources that are interoperable with other repositories in Mexico and the Region of the Americas. The University of Guadalajara Virtual Campus committee has followed the proposed model as much as possible, thereby achieving mostof the goals set in the initial work plan, despite a number of administrative challenges and the difficulty of motivating committee members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we research our practices as educational researchers from a post-foundational perspective? How can we build tools of intellection that explain the historical and biographical conditions of the individual who performs research in the educational field? This paper centers on the subject of a biography as a discursive/textual and political subject from a post-foundational perspective. The conceptualization turns to the categories of discourse (Laclau) and text (Derrida) as a theoretical enclave, and based on current research on the academic trajectories of educational researchers, four dimensions of analysis are developed: collective experience, academic professionalization, institutional life, and biographical educational experience. The purpose is to show some examples of the emergence of the subject of biographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to research children's and teenagers' understanding of signatures, in terms of formal characteristics and the way this knowledge is made manifest during the challenging process of producing a signature of one's own. The data we present show that in the age range under study (7-15 years old), the participants have made precise reflections on signatures and the type of resources and graphic elements necessary in writing of this type. The analysis focuses on three main areas for articulating the participants' process of constructing their signature: legibility, graphic appearance, and the conservation or omission of elements from the name itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the production of autobiographical texts in education during the last decade in Mexico. We have divided the paper into two sections. In the first section, based on the idea of field, we show the referents that have been valuable for us in approaching the biographical/educational field in Mexico, and the way biographies are disseminated in Mexican culture. h e second section centers on areas or interests in the biographical field, organized as three topics of broad interest for the academic community: biography/autobiography; oral histories/stories/life histories and trajectory. The article concludes with some reflections: the diversification of autobiographies; rel ection on experience and theory; the issue of truth in the biographical field; traditions regarding the utilization of sacred authors and the author's word in autobiographical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the normative framework for equity in the policies of the Mexican state, especially policies directed to higher education. Th e empirical referent was a set of documents that regulate and orient actions on inclusion and equity for attaining social cohesion in Mexico, based on the idea that our nation is constituted by diverse peoples and indigenous inhabitants, handicapped people, "alternate" movements, and other groups, and therefore must be governed according to the characteristics of all citizens. Th is document forms part of a broader research project referred to as the "Inter-University Framework Program for Equity and Social Cohesion Policies in Higher Education", within the work of the Latin American Research Network in Educational Policy (RIAIPE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies educational inequality in Mexico, examining educational differences between the country's states. To carry out this analysis, an adaptation of the statistical measure known as the Gini coefficient was used. The results show marked differences between Mexican states with regard to education. There are large inequality gaps between the states in Mexico that have persisted over time despite the fact that the data indicate that education has become more equal in all of the country's states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the tradition of studies on the use or influence of research, this paper presents work on the relation between research and policy, based on the evaluation of higher education. The results show that educational research in Mexico has influenced the political agenda, by including arguments and reorienting debate, and even by modifying initiatives and programs; contributing factors have been the type of research, as well as the assumption or expansion of academic roles into circles of political decision-making. The report also identifies traits of interaction between researchers and government employees, while contributing to the comprehension of the use of research by weighing some of the involved elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes data from two researches, a local one and a national one. It aims to contribute in the articulation between the characteristics of the programs and the population interests and necessities; it exposes the senses that structure the experience of young of a marginal urban area in the center of Mexico and a group of Mayan women of the southeast of the country. The first is a Center of Education for Adults and it discovers that the local sense is structured from collectives such as family, social and productive activities, work, school exclusion experience and high valuation of cultural codes of the traditional school. The second is a Meeting Point of the National Institute for Adult Education in which the socialization, dialogue, teaching, organization for the community, resources appropriation to develop the social roles structure the sense of the experiences of the Mayan women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]